Dear Editor,

I see that your columnist, Ken Chaplin, wrote last Tuesday that “investigations carried out by this writer have established beyond all reasonable doubt that while the Jamaican Supreme Court judge authorised the interception of conversations by Christopher Coke … the information was illegally forwarded to US authorities in clear violation of the extradition treaty”.

Well that settles it, then. No need for the Supreme Court to bother; Ken Chaplin has established this “beyond all reasonable doubt”. Now, we can all rest easy.

But Mr Chaplin’s column doesn’t establish anything. He has not identified “Constable John Doe” and, like the Solicitor General, has assumed the circumstances of the Americans’ receipt of the evidence and the “facts” that John Doe is a constable and now living in the US. Why? He has heard no evidence; no one has been cross-examined before him; his “investigations” are secret; he has revealed nothing new; yet somehow, he has “established” the Attorney General’s rectitude “beyond all reasonable doubt”. Wow!

Then he compounds the illogic by regurgitating his finding of illegally obtained evidence as reason that the extradition is “prohibited”. But nothing in the IOCA can “prohibit” an extradition. An allegation of illegally obtained evidence might become relevant at an extradition trial where it could influence a judge to extradite or not, but it prohibits nothing. The political prohibitions to extradition (political victimisation; jingoism; double jeopardy) are set out in the Extradition Act not in the Interception of Communications Act, and do not permit ministers or journalists to make judicial findings.

Again, the specific, carefully crafted and easily understood provisions of that Act quoted by Mr Chaplin refer to those prohibitions listed in the Act itself and which are plainly apparent to the minister on the face of the request. Only a court can hold an extradition hearing and only after a charge has been laid.

Gordon Robinson

gordon_robinson@flowja.com